YEAH, THAT'S AWKWARD

Since we've been in Taiwan I (Phil) have had students tell me they love me and I've had them hug me in the middle of class. I've had 7th and 8th grade girls stare and giggle at me for a few minutes straight while I'm trying to help other students. I've even had a 7th grade boy pat my butt twice in one class period. These have all been awkward moments for me. Throw in the fact that I can't communicate with anyone about these situations and it magnifies the awkwardness by at least five.

Even though I've experienced many awkward things since I've been here, nothing compares to what happened to me on Tuesday October 6th, 2009. It's still hard for me to believe that this event actually happened to me and if I could've voted I would've voted that it happen to someone else. Situations don't come any more awkward than this.

The bus I take after school usually leaves the Huwei bus station between 5:45 and 6:00. It is about a fifteen minute walk from my school to the bus station so I usually leave school at 5:25 to ensure that I won't miss my bus. Some days I wait five minutes others I wait fifteen minutes or longer. On Tuesday the 6th my bus came at 5:55, allowing for the following story to happen. Dang buses.

As I approached the bus stop I could see it was much busier than normal, maybe 20-25 additional people. I also noticed what looked like a junior high boy running and jumping in front of the bus stop. He went back and forth from in front of the ticket window to 20 or so feet right of the ticket window, pausing a couple of seconds before heading back the other way. He would run a couple of steps and jump. I thought he was just being goofy because when he jumped his arms did not move like they would when people jump “normally”. His arms stayed stiff right by his sides. I thought “what a goof ball, why is he running around and jumping when there are all these people here?”

When I arrived at the bus stop I saw that it was not a junior high boy being goofy. In fact it was a girl, in her early 20's, with a disability. I felt bad. I immediately apologized to her in my head. I got in a long line to get my ticket and she was still running and jumping. I want to take a quick moment and say that I had not seen this girl at the bus station before, so my best guess is that she was really excited to ride the bus. Anyways, as I waited in line and watched her jump around, I wondered if there was anyone with her. I took a quick look around and I didn't see anyone.

Around the third or fourth time she ran and jumped her way to the ticket booth she noticed me. It was very obvious she noticed me because she walked towards me and starred at me. Now, in my short time here in Taiwan I think I have developed a pretty good strategy for when people stare at me. Once I know they are looking at me, I look at them, make eye contact so they know I see them staring and then look away and hope they stop staring. She continued to stare, very hard. I'm talking leaned over, head tilted, eyes fixed only on me, stare. I tried to play it cool and just look forward and ignore her, but she just kept right on staring. If I were to exaggerate the amount of time she stared at me I would say an hour, but realistically it was probably at least a minute or two. Is it just me or is that not a long time to be stared at? I finally broke down and looked at her again and smiled. Oh, that made her incredibly happy. So happy, in fact, that she felt the need to scream and clap her hands very loudly. I thought for sure that everyone would be looking at her or me, but when I glanced around nobody had even flinched. No reaction whatsoever.

Getting stared at for a few minutes is awkward, but I haven't even gotten to the good stuff yet. This next part get a little PG-13. After I purchased my ticket I went and sat down on a bench to relax and wait for my bus, which I was hoping would arrive any moment. My staring friend was now standing about fifteen feet to my left and facing away from me. It seemed as though she forgot about me, but she hadn't. I think she was probably planning what she was going to do next. :) After a few moments of relaxation I tensed up when I saw her look at me and start walking towards me. I really didn't want to deal with another stare down, but what was I going to do. It was too crowded to hurry out of my spot... and I was comfortable on the bench. She put her face about a foot away from mine, a highly uncomfortable distance. She stared at me for a few moments and then she wrapped her arms around my neck and proceeded to kiss me on the lips!

I bet you’re wondering how I didn't see it coming or why I didn't stop her. Quite frankly when I saw her face a foot away from mine I wanted to kiss her too. Just kidding! :) Really what happened is I was just taken by complete surprise. Once her arms were around my neck I struggled to unlock them...she was either stronger than I expected or I just didn’t want to hurt her in the process. As for the kiss...it left something to be desired. I don't even think our lips touched really. Her top lip was above mine and her bottom lip was below mine. My mouth was sealed shut and hers must have been...I don't even want to think about it. Technically I think she kissed my mouth and I kissed her teeth. The kiss lasted a dreadful 3-5 seconds because I couldn’t undo the death lock she had around my neck. I'm sure 3-5 seconds doesn’t sound that long, but if you actually count out the seconds and then picture getting kissed by a complete stranger, then it'll feel pretty long.

After I managed to pry her arms and face off me, as politely as I could I said, “No.” and shuffled through people to get away. I went to the back of the sitting area and just stood there, looking at the ground. I didn't know what to do. I had no one to talk to or laugh with about what just happened. Once again no one seemed to notice what just happened. They all just stood there waiting for their bus. No laughter, no whispers, and no eyes looking at me. It was weird. A couple of minutes later her bus came and picked her up. She made sure to wave goodbye to me and then hopped on the bus, happy as could be. I'm sure she thought she had just kissed David Beckham. :)

This kiss would have been painful no matter who the stranger was. I cringe if I have to think about kissing someone besides Annalicia (Note: Randy and Lynda - I only kissed your daughter once and that was at our wedding...Peter made me). Matter of fact I cringe when I think about holding someone else's hand (Note: Randy and Lynda - I'll admit we do hold hands). This was a pretty traumatic experience for me and when I got home and told Annalicia she busted out laughing right in my face. She loved it and thought it was so hilarious. She didn't give me hug and show sympathy, she just laughed uncontrollably, while I stood there traumatized. I had to wait a few minutes before I could even tell her the whole story.

Usually I don't kiss and tell...but my wife made me.

One more reason I should have a scooter, don't you think?

OUR APARTMENT

Phil and I just realized the other day that we hadn’t posted pictures of our apartment yet. We decided it’s probably time to do that...

The picture below is of our apartment building. We live in the unit directly to the right of the green oval sign sticking out of the building. Our apartment is supposed to be an actual home, but because of the way most homes are setup in Taiwan, it works for our landlord to rent out separate rooms to different tenants.

We do laundry on the roof of our building.

Below you will see the view from our roof. The reddish-brown building with the trees below it and what looks like a triangle at the top, is my school...as you can see, we live very close to where I work.

The inside of our apartment consists of three rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom and a living room/dining room/kitchenette area. Our apartment is very nice...it’s brand new, but with white concrete walls, white tile floors, no storage closets and no kitchen, it kind of feels like a really incredible dorm room versus an actual apartment. That’s okay with us, though, we like it!

The pictures below are of our living room/dining room/kitchenette area. This is the area we enter into from our stairwell. Our apartment came furnished, which was very helpful. As you’ll probably notice, our couch and chairs are bright blue and red. At first we rolled our eyes in disgust at these “interior decorating disasters”, but now we really like them! We find they bring some fun color into our otherwise very white apartment. They’re also a great way to symbolize our time here because Taiwan’s flag’s colors are blue and red. Finally, the couch and chairs match our luggage. This may not seem like a big deal, but with no closet to store our luggage in, it’s nice to be able to think of our bags as adding to the room’s color, instead of clashing with everything for an entire year! :)

As we walk down the hallway from our living room/dining room/kitchenette area to our bedroom, our bathroom is on the right. Our bathroom is great! It has a western toilet and a shower with massage shower heads.

Finally, you’ll see our bedroom below. Our bed is pretty big...it’s two single beds put together. We weren’t able to find a blanket large enough to cover the whole thing.

ADDRESS UPDATE

Quite a few of you asked for our mailing address and when we gave it to you, we gave you both our apartment address and my school's address. We told you to use our apartment address for regular mail and my school's address for packages. Well, recently people at my school told me that they think we should have all our mail sent to my school because they're afraid it won't get to us if it's sent to our apartment (I'm not exactly sure why). So, with that said, if you're planning on sending us any mail, please send it to the following address:

Yunlin Elementary School
Attn: Annalicia Niemela
No. 111, Zhuangjing Rd.
Douliu City, Yunlin County, 640
Taiwan

RECENT WEEKEND ADVENTURES

Taichung

On the weekend of September 12th-13th, Phil and I ventured out of Douliu to Taichung...the third largest city in Taiwan, about an hour train ride north of Douliu. Our travels got off to a funny start when we noticed a stray dog in the Douliu Train Station...no one seemed too concerned! :)




We arrived in Taichung on Saturday in the early afternoon and decided we should find a place to stay. To get some ideas, we whipped out our trusty “Lonely Planet” Taiwan travel book. We found a hotel we were interested in staying at and located it within 15 minutes. To our dismay, it had closed down. After we sighed and decided we’d just walk around the city to see what we’d find, we looked up across the street and saw a Holiday Inn Express!

Now, it wasn’t our intention to travel all the way over to Taiwan to stay in American hotels, but when you’re carrying your travel bags around in intense heat and humidity, wondering if you’ll be able to find a place you want to stay and on top of that, wondering if you’ll be able to communicate with anyone at the place you want to stay, seeing a Holiday Inn Express is a breath of fresh air! :) Everyone at the Holiday Inn Express spoke great English and they gave us a room with a very nice view of Taichung Park for half price!

After we checked into our hotel room, we decided it was time for some sightseeing! I work with a guy named Andio. His hometown is Taichung. So, he wrote down some things we should see and do in the city. It was nice because he wrote them down in English and Chinese. This was extremely helpful, especially when we got lost! :)

One of the highlights of our trip to Taichung was visiting a Buddhist temple with an ENORMOUS statue of Laughing Buddha. If you look closely at one of the pictures, you’ll see Phil standing below the statue...that gives you an idea of how big this thing is!

On Saturday night we...I :)...thought it would be fun to get dressed up and go out for a nice dinner. Someone told us about a restaurant we should go to with an English menu and gave us the address.

We found the street on a map and took a taxi (taxies are really cheap in Taiwan) to that street. The street didn’t look very long on the map, so we just thought we’d walk down it and find the restaurant. Well, things didn’t go as planned. We walked down this “not very long” street for about an hour and found nothing. Hungry, sweaty, tired, not so cute anymore we ended up eating at McDonald’s...typical Americans! :)

Then, we took a taxi back to our hotel. Luckily, someone had given us a helpful tip...take pictures of everything, so if you want or need to go back to a particular place, you can just show the taxi driver the picture. It works great!

Kaohsiung

The following weekend, September 18th-19th, we took an hour and a half train ride south to the second biggest city in Taiwan, Kaohsiung. We met up with a few other foreign English teachers that we had met at orientation. It was great to see them and we had a fun time hanging out!

Kaohsiung is beautiful at night. Most of the pictures below are in or around Kaohsiung’s Central Park area.

In Taipei and in Kaohsiung they have a public transportation system called the MRT. This system is extremely convenient and well organized. They also keep the facilities looking amazing! (If you’re caught eating, drinking or chewing gum on the MRT, you have to pay a very large fine.) This system is also intended to be very safe. For example, at most of the stops, there are blue rectangles painted on the floor. People who feel unsafe, traveling alone at night, are suppose to stand in those rectangles because there are security guards watching those areas via video camera at all times. What a great idea!

We stayed at a beautiful hotel for the price of 55 USD per night!

In this hotel, like many other hotels, hospitals, malls and office buildings, they didn’t have a floor number four. The reason for this is the word “four” in Chinese is very similar to the word “death”. (Many people here are very superstitious.)

Our trip to Kaohsiung was fun, but quick! We ended up having to be back in Douliu by the late afternoon on Saturday because one of my co-teachers invited us over for dinner.

KTV

After dinner with my co-teacher and her family on Saturday night, they whipped out their KTV system and we started singing! The great part about KTV that I forgot to mention awhile back when I explained it, is that the pictures and movies going on behind the words have nothing to do with the song. So, for example, you might be singing, “I’m All Out of Love” and be watching people surfing and then an airplane flying and then two kids walking down a sidewalk...you just never know what you’re going to see!

The pictures below are of my co-teachers children. Samantha is in eighth grade and Samuel is three...so cute!

PHIL'S EXCELLENT BUS ADVENTURES

Please keep in mind that I tell this story with a smile on my face.

Two weeks ago (Aug. 31-Sept. 4), my first week of school, the buses traveling from Douliu and Huwei went a little haywire. On Tuesday my bus to Huwei did not take its normal route. I could tell because where it usually turns right it turned left. I had asked two different people if the bus was going to Huwei so I wasn’t nervous about getting to Huwei, but I was nervous about finding a place to get off the bus. As we got into Huwei I had caught a glimpse of a street sign that went near my school. I got off on the next stop and followed the road to my school. I was pretty proud that I got off at the right stop on the first try and I felt like I just dodged a major catastrophe. Wednesday would be a different story.

My bus had taken the same route as it did on Tuesday, but I wasn’t worried at all because I had made getting off on the right stop seem so easy. When we reached Huwei I started looking for that same road sign I saw on Monday, only I did not see it anywhere. I did not recognize any landmarks because well, on Monday I got lucky and didn’t pay attention to anything other than the fact that I did such a great job getting off on the right stop. As the bus continued to make stops I tried my hardest to find my road sign without looking super nervous. At one point I had two ladies standing up in the middle of the aisle talking and blocking my view to the other side of the road while I was desperately looking for my road sign. I never saw my road sign in Huwei and after 4 or 5 stops the bus driver pulled off the road, stopped the bus and started yelled something. After a few clueless moments of wondering why he stopped I had some nice passengers come a talk to me. I had four people trying to tell me something, none of them used English. My only guess was that we were leaving Huwei and everyone had known I missed my bus. I can’t imagine how dumb I looked when I just smiled and shrugged my shoulders at them. I was not about to get off the bus when I had no clue where I was. So after they figured out they couldn’t communicate with me the bus driver continued on his way. I had no idea what I was going to do. I pulled out my phone to call Annalicia and it died on the third ring.

As we entered the next city a woman who had tried to talk to me back in Huwei came up to me, said something in Chinese, grabbed me out of my chair, and led me off the bus. I felt like a child. We waited at the bus stop for about ten minutes and then hopped on a bus headed back to Huwei. We go into Huwei and the lady told me that my school was three blocks straight. I had told her that I was a teacher at Dongren Junior High, who knows if she actually knew what I was saying. I glanced at my watch, 8:37, I was supposed to be at school 7 minutes ago.

I walked three blocks straight in the direction she pointed me and wouldn’t you know it, there was not a school in sight. I felt like I was in a reality T.V. show where you get dropped off in an unknown location and had to find your way out. Only I had no one to come and get me when I wanted to quit. I wandered around taking random turns hoping I would see something I recognized.

After about 45 minutes I noticed an English school. Perfect. I walked over, reached to open the door when I noticed they were closed. Why wouldn’t they be in this situation? I put my head against the glass door and covered the glare with my hands to see if anyone was in there. There was a lady at the desk. I waved at her. She didn’t respond. I waved her to the door. She didn’t respond. She had to have noticed me, sweaty white guy waving at her. I finally got her to come to the door and I asked her where Dongren Junior High was. She told me to go straight and when I see a stoplight take a left and then keep going straight after you see another stoplight. That didn’t make much sense to me, but I assumed that she meant take a left at the first stoplight and go straight, but I didn’t feel like testing her English to clarify. So I took a left at the first stoplight and after about ten minutes I saw a taxi sitting on the side of the road. Awesome. I pulled out my notebook (a teacher we met wrote down some phrases for me in English and Chinese) and pointed at the phrase that said “do you go to Dongren Junior High”. The cab driver shook his head and said no. I was in shock. Aren’t taxis supposed to take you where you want to go?

I kept walking straight and I ended up reaching a T. How was I supposed to go straight at a T? I went back to the English school, went past the first stoplight and took a random left which brought me to a park I recognized and finally to the street where I was supposed to get off the bus an hour ago. I got to my school at 10:00 and to my amazement no one had known I was an hour and a half late.

I thought my day was long and then on the way home I waited another hour and a half for my bus home. The other days I only waited 10-15 minutes for a bus. I thought that was a long wait. The next day, Thursday, my bus never came. Some high school students brought me to the bus station in Huwei, but the buses weren’t stopping at the bus station either. I thought that was the point of a bus station. We ended up waiting at the bus garage and finally caught a bus headed for Douliu at 8:00. While we were waiting for our bus one of the high school students told me that the bus system here isn’t very good and that sometimes bus drivers will skip stops. I guess I had to find out the hard way. A teacher at Annalicia’s school said that maybe the bus drivers were drunk and forgot to make some stops. I can’t wait to get on the bus again.


Time spent looking for school after completely missing stop: 1.5 hours

Time spent standing and waiting for a bus at usual stop where it normally takes ten minutes for a bus: 1.5 hours

Time spent tracking down a place to catch a bus because bus never showed: 3 hours

Using the bus system to get to and from school in order to save money: Worthless

INTERESTING ENGLISH NAMES

We know a lot of you are wondering how school is going for us and we want you all to know it's going well! I think the reason we haven't written about it yet is because there's so much to tell and explain that writing the entry seems like a daunting task. With that being said, though, we want to fill you in with all the experiences we've been having at school. So, hopefully sometime in the near future we'll have the time to tackle the task of updating you on that part of our lives (and show you some picture of where we work)! Unfortunately, that's not going to happen this weekend because we are traveling to Taichung (a large city about an hour north of Douliu) for two days and don't have the time to write a lot.

So, instead, we thought we'd try to bring some smiles to your faces by listing some interesting English names we've encountered since being here. Some of these are elementary students' names, some are junior high students' names and some are adult names. There are a few things we want to say in defense of the people who have their English names listed below. First, we appreciate the fact that they have an English name at all. English names make our lives so much easier here. Second, sometimes people here will create an English name using the sounds of their Chinese name. This makes sense, but for some reason it doesn't stop us from finding these names humorous. And, finally, we realize it would be hard to choose an appropriate name in a different language and to satisfy a different culture. In fact, it even seems a little hypocritical that we created this list considering Phil's Chinese name is Fe Li Pu! :)

Here they are.....
---YoYo
---YuYu
---BoBo
---RoRo
---Sun
---Sunny
---KiKi
---Aih
---Our
---Happy
---WieWie
---Nelum
---Peko
---Lovey (not LoveLy...just Lovey)
---Handsome
---Pinky
---Amily (not Emily)
---A boy named Alice
---PiPi (pronounced "pee pee")
---Teeth
---Chest
---A boy named Jenny
---King
---Grape
---Navel
---A boy named Gretel
---Nretel
---Egg
---Eggs

THE SORRY SONG

Right now in Asia a song called, "Sorry Sorry" by a Korean music group called Super Junior is a big hit. We've been told that in Korea people sincerely love the song and the music video that goes with it. However, here in Taiwan, people like to make fun of the song and the dance. Recently, a group of Taiwanese comedians (similar to the comedians who act on "Saturday Night Live" in the US...they often impersonate politicians and celebrities) appeared on an entertainment show pretending to be Super Junior and performed the "Sorry Sorry" song and dance. After the show aired, almost everyone in Taiwan became familiar with the song. Now, we hear and see people of all ages singing and dancing to "Sorry Sorry"! :)

This is a link to the actual "Sorry Sorry" music video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9PqwYOAPJA&feature=fvw

This is a link to the clip of the Taiwanese comedians impersonating Super Junior:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wekZkF6jGw